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Pieter Wagenaar ; Stefan Soeparman
2003 Information Polity
At the moment the Dutch police is busily integrating its information domains. What effect will this have on the Dutch police system? Will it cause the stark centralisation Bellamy and Taylor feared in 1997? Due to the peculiarities of its institutional arrangements, simply posing the centralisation/decentralisation question about the Dutch police system leads to little. As we will show in our article, if we want to assess anything at all about the direction the system is heading in, we also need to pay attention to two other oppositions determining its organisation: the administrative versus the judicial police duty, and administrative police management versus authority over the police. It is these three oppositions that form the Dutch police system's 'institutional paradigm': the norms, values, cognitions, rules and regulations that determine its organisation.
2003 Information Polity
In France, electronic administration has become an emblem of State and Civil service modernization. For a better understanding of the way in which Information Technology (IT) has gradually become part of the somewhat traditional effort at French State modernization, this paper will analyse the processes involved in the construction of a complete and coherent project. The in-depth study of public reports and interviews carried out with main actors involved in the reform shows the hazards of the process. Revealing the ways and means in which IT has an influence on modernization enhances understanding of the nature of the changes sought. This paper provides an opportunity to take into account the players' viewpoints, starting with unresolved issues and the tensions resulting from the reforms. The final part of the paper focuses on the so-called Bercy reforms.
Mirko Vintar ; Mateja Kunstelj ; Mitja Dečman ; Boštjan Berčič
2003 Information Polity
E-government has been a hot topic in the public administration research community for some time now. While still considered by some to be merely a technological phenomenon, it also includes organisational changes in public administration, development and implementation of new business processes, discovering better and faster ways of providing public services and offering entirely new services, not known before. In this article we try to look at the development of e-government in Slovenia from both perspectives, technological and organisational. We explore the public administration presence on the Internet, the services it provides and the back-office systems that support them. The current state of electronic services provided by various public administration bodies is examined, both from the end user's perspective and from a technological point of view. We present the current state of e-government with respect to the action plans it has committed itself, while relying on well-known methodology adopted by the European Commission.
2003 Information Polity
The modernisation of public services in the Information age has placed the use, management and exchange of information at the centre of the work of local government. As much of the information held by councils is location based, the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in these organisations is set to take on a far greater corporate significance. The UK Government's promotion of "joined-up" initiatives in key sectors such as health, education and crime prevention, has focused attention on the types of factors that may influence the exchange and analysis of such data, much of which is held by local authorities. Despite a number of studies that have demonstrated the potential of data sharing, there has been a lack of published research into the relationship between the e-Government programme and the management and use of geographic information (GI) in local authorities. This paper describes the results of a national survey of local authorities that has examined the degree to which councils have included provision for the use and management of geographic information and GIS in their formal visions for e-government. It is clear from the survey that GI(S) are seen as very important to the e-government process with almost ninety per cent of respondents stating that GI(S) features in their e-government strategies. However, if full advantage is to be taken of the integrating ability of geographic information, then effective and efficient management of this information must be undertaken at a corporate level.
Ulrika Josefsson ; Agneta Ranerup
2003 Information Polity
An important transformation of the welfare state of today is the marketisation reforms many times strengthening the role of citizens' preferences in their choice of public services. Another important transformation is the new electronic intermediaries between citizens and the public sector that have emerged during the last few years. This paper focuses on intermediaries between citizens and the public sector when viewed in a quasi-market perspective. Our objects of study are Swedish patients' online communities and public portals for educational opportunities representing different forms of ownership. The aim of the paper is to problematize the capacities to act that citizens are provided with by means of the new intermediaries. We argue that the forms of citizens' influence induced by the marketisation reforms and the new electronic intermediaries provide capacities to act that have previously only to a limited extent been discussed in a systematic manner. In this paper the supplementary role of consumerist activities compared with e.g. representative and deliberative democracy is acknowledged. However, we conclude that the intermediaries are sophisticated instruments in a learning process that support the citizens' development into active consumers of public services.
2003 Information Polity
In this paper we examine how the transformational potential of information and communication technologies and Labour's partnership with the voluntary sector are being brought together in ways that could bring voluntary organisations more intimately within the centre-ground of the democratic polity. Drawing upon the concept of the 'information polity' we map the new patterns of influence that are emerging around the ownership and control of information as this re-positioning occurs.